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Back in October 2015, we brought you a story that struck at the heart of an eight-legged obsession of ours: In a world full of strange and interesting creatures, octopuses definitely sit at the head of the table when it comes to weird gag-inducing sea creeps. Two more videos have recently come to our attention (scroll down) to confirm this.

All ‘arms and legs’, starey eyes and suction, they look like the love child of a spider and a slug that’s been dropped into a vat of radiactive waste. One that’s then been partially digested in the six stomachs of a cow and spat back out into the ocean. Scientists have been fascinated with these water beasts for a while, carefully mapping out their full DNA sequence to learn more about why they’re so different from everything else.

The discovery? Octopuses are like no other creature on the planet. Researcher Dr Clifton Ragsdale from the University of Chicago said: “The octopus appears to be utterly different from all other animals, even other molluscs, with it’s eight prehensile arms, its large brain and its clever problem-solving abilities.”

The multi-limbed creatures are renowned for their sucker-lined tentacles, incredible ‘reactive’ camouflage systems, three hearts, incredibly powerful eyeballs and the ability to utilise jet propulsion. Not to mention the fact that they can re-grow detached limbs at will.

“The late British zoologist Martin Wells said the octopus is an alien. In this sense, then, our paper describes the first sequenced genome from an alien.”

So there you have it, they’re here. They’ve been here for a while and ultimately they’ll probably take over the world and make us their octo-slaves.

Terrifying.

For an idea of just how alien they are, check out the following...

Exhibit A

Insane camouflage.

Exhibit B

An octopus clearly demonstrating that it understands how to use two halves of a coconut as its own portable armour-cum-wheel transport device.

Exhibit C

A fairly large octopus squeezes its entire body through a fairly small hole on a ship, causing us to eject our lunch all over our keyboard.